Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely
Dan Arielyis the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and also the co-founder of BEworks. Ariely's talks on TED have been watched over 7.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers, as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty...
NationalityIsraeli
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth29 April 1967
CountryIsrael
In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.
Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we've done so far, what mistakes we've made, and what improvements should come next.
I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.
That’s a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity.
If you ever go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you? You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. Similar ... but slightly uglier.
We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we’re not going to do better.
Money is very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? Now, you would expect people to have an answer. But people were kind of shocked by the question. They never thought about it before. So, the most we got was people said, "Well, if I can't buy this Toyota, if I buy this Toyota, I can't buy a Honda." What is this thing? What is this value of price? Very hard to think about it.
Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.
The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.
What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.
It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.
individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others)
The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.
that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.